…and the house he shares with his people.

Living & Dining room inspirations

Realistic inspiration photo hunting can be hard. There are so many gorgeous dining rooms out there, but most just aren’t imitable in my house! Despite having more projects up in the air than I can keep up with, I’ve been having fun doing some looking for new living- and dining room decor.

Window Treatments

I ordered swatches this week of several curtains that I liked, all from Country Curtains which, fortunately, carries more than just country curtains:

Left to Right: Westport stripe in seafoam, Moire stripe in mist, and Eastover stripe in platinum

If nothing else, I’m at least being consistent with my thing for stripes! All of these are available separately in panels and valences of varying shapes, so the threshold decision is which material, then the shape. I confess that the middle panels, the Moire Stripe, are my favorite by far. I love the blue-green.

One thing I haven’t resolved yet is what I want to do over the living room bay window for privacy. Plantation shutters? Roller or roman shades? Ack. Nothing seems quite right.

Paint

If I am not careful, I am going to find myself in the midst of a paint embargo here at Guin’s Yard. This weekend at the SW sale, I bought four gallons – one tinted Sandbar for the master bedroom, 1 backup (untinted), and 2 (untinted) for the eventual living & dining room project (hey, it was 40% off!). I also bought a quart each of paint & primer for a pair of bookcases that I acquired recently. The problem is that I still have a quart of black paint and primer from the LAST sale for some chairs and end tables that I’m going to paint, but haven’t gotten to yet. Good thing winter (read: indoor home improvement season) is coming up soon. The best way to dig myself out of this is to start using the paint!

I bet you’ll never guess what color, roughly, I’m dying to do a room in.

Painting the trim white

Especially if we break down and replace the carpet, this is a great opportunity to start painting the trim white, something I’ve been thinking about for the last 2 years. Actually (add this to the reasons for a paint embargo), we already have a gallon of SW Alabaster for just that purpose, bought 2 years ago. While I love original stained hardwood trim, and prefer it above other trim options, white painted trim is better than cheap laminate or pine trim with some stain slapped on it. Since the latter is what we have, I think we’re best served painting (most of) the trim in the house white, save for a few pieces (like the bay window itself).

Upgrading the crown molding

The current crown molding is thin quarter round stained molding that, if we painted it white, would just disappear. Rather than putting the effort into sanding, priming, and painting it, it might be time to invest in a mitre saw.

Then we’d be able to put up something more substantial, like this:

in both the living and dining rooms, so they’d match better.

Other ideas – Faux Paneling?

Once the wallpaper’s gone and the paint is up, faux paneling could be fun to do in the dining room. Bower Power did an awesome step by step tutorial, showing how they went from here:

Before: from Paneling Play by Play | Bower Power

to here:

After: from Paneling Play by Play | Bower Power

Instead of all white, I have also seen it done with a darker accent color inside the panel boxes, like this awesome job by bensbade823:

I am getting way ahead of myself with half of this, but it’s fun to think about.

On that note, it’s time to go do something less fun but more concrete – a first coat of spackle on the bedroom wall, over the dog scratch marks so I can break out that Sandbar paint soon. In terms of excitement, all projects are definitely not created equal!